Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Abe the Rides.
Speaker 2: Remarks based enough time.
Speaker 1: Job, how often have you thought about making a major
Speaker 1: change in your career. You're gonna give up time, effort, money, education,
Speaker 1: but in the end, if it pays off, it could
Speaker 1: be very worthwhile to be true to yourself. On today's
Speaker 1: at the Money, let's bring in Morgan Housel. He is
Speaker 1: the author of the Psychology of Money, a book that
Speaker 1: sold over seven million worldwide. His new book, The Art
Speaker 1: of Spending Money, arrived in October. So, Morgan, I know
Speaker 1: you've had a bunch of jobs and even a bunch
Speaker 1: of careers ski patrol valet, Like, what was the original
Speaker 1: career plan.
Speaker 3: With you when I was When I was a teenager,
Speaker 3: my first job was well, my first job was a
Speaker 3: was a host at Denny's.
Speaker 2: That was That was a glorious job.
Speaker 3: And then so I grew up as a ski racer,
Speaker 3: so then it was it was a natural flow for
Speaker 3: me to get a job in the ski industry. I
Speaker 3: worked in a in a ski rental tech place for
Speaker 3: it for a while, and then I got my first
Speaker 3: kind of quote unquote real job was as a valet
Speaker 3: at a high end hotel that was on a ski resort,
Speaker 3: so that was cool. But all throughout my kind of
Speaker 3: like uh late teenage college years, I really only thought
Speaker 3: I had one career path, and that was how I
Speaker 3: was going to be an investment banker, and then maybe
Speaker 3: later on that changed to I'm gonna be a hedge
Speaker 3: fount manager. I didn't really know anything about either of
Speaker 3: those careers, but nineteen year old Morgan loved the idea
Speaker 3: that they appeared to make a lot of money and
Speaker 3: have a lot of power, and so that was appealing
Speaker 3: to me because I was all that I knew. And then, haphazardly,
Speaker 3: not not on purpose, and kind of with a sense
Speaker 3: of shame, I stumbled into a job as a writer.
Speaker 3: Because I graduated college in two thousand and eight, nobody
Speaker 3: was hiring. The economy is a mess. The only job
Speaker 3: I can find that was related to investing was as
Speaker 3: a blogger for The Motley Fool. I did not want
Speaker 3: to do it. I hated writing. I had no experience
Speaker 3: doing it, but I thought I would do it for
Speaker 3: six months until I stumbled into it, but then I
Speaker 3: ended up loving it. It took a year, but it
Speaker 3: was like, actually, I was like, oh, this is this
Speaker 3: is pretty fun. I actually liked doing this. And then
Speaker 3: over you know, that was you know, seventeen years ago,
Speaker 3: and over those seventeen years, I've had several different transitions,
Speaker 3: doing different things, but they've all kind of been had
Speaker 3: this common core of I just like being an observer
Speaker 3: of how people think about money and investing, and I
Speaker 3: want to tell a good story about it. But there
Speaker 3: have been several different paths and transitions within that, within
Speaker 3: that core that I've gone down.
Speaker 1: A blogger for the Motley Fool. I wouldn't even call
Speaker 1: that a journalist. You're just a content producer at that point.
Speaker 1: How long did it take before you this six month?
Speaker 1: I'm going to just put up with this until I
Speaker 1: find something better. What was the transition that led you
Speaker 1: to realize, Hey, I got a knack for this. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's more to this than I realized.
Speaker 3: I think what was really good In hindsight, it felt
Speaker 3: terrible at the time, but because the job market in
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight, nine and ten was so bad,
Speaker 3: I didn't have the choice of giving up. There's no
Speaker 3: other job for me. I had a rent payment to make,
Speaker 3: so even in the first year or two that I
Speaker 3: didn't like writing at all. It was like, yeah, but
Speaker 3: that's what you're like. Sorry, Paal did deal with it.
Speaker 3: That's what you're doing. There's no other jobs out there.
Speaker 3: That was really good in hindsight, because it took me
Speaker 3: a couple of years to kind of find my stride
Speaker 3: a little bit, just like anybody in any job. The
Speaker 3: other thing about writing online or doing anything online is
Speaker 3: that if your work is bad, people will tell you
Speaker 3: in no uncertain terms how bad it is and how
Speaker 3: dumb you are and how stupid you are. That is
Speaker 3: painful in the moment, but it is such a powerful
Speaker 3: feedback loop that you're able to learn very quickly if
Speaker 3: you're paying attention to that criticism. And so every blog
Speaker 3: post that I wrote, I would put it out there
Speaker 3: and people would either say this sucks and I'd say, okay,
Speaker 3: let me try to learn from that, or Hey, this
Speaker 3: is really good and let me try to learn from that.
Speaker 3: So the feedback mechanism was so powerful that after doing
Speaker 3: it for two years just to make rent, it was
Speaker 3: kind of like, oh, this is actually fun, and there's
Speaker 3: some readers out there who seem to be enjoying what
Speaker 3: I'm putting out and that's so it was good that
Speaker 3: I had that forcing function of having to do it,
Speaker 3: rather than having an exit ramp where I could have
Speaker 3: gone and done something else.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious about the transition from blogger and I
Speaker 1: have been blogging for one hundred years, so I don't
Speaker 1: use it pejoratively, but to a more formal either journalist
Speaker 1: or market commentator that was the next tier up. How
Speaker 1: did that happen.
Speaker 2: I've never considered myself a journalist. I don't think I
Speaker 2: ever will.
Speaker 1: I don't have it either, but I will accuse us
Speaker 1: of being journalist.
Speaker 3: Right, you know we are, we are journaling, but I
Speaker 3: don't consider myself a capital J journalist. But what's true
Speaker 3: is that once I realized that my audience was growing,
Speaker 3: and I realized who that audience was, there was a
Speaker 3: little bit I struggle to say, sense of duty. That
Speaker 3: that sounds like it's too much, but it was a
Speaker 3: little bit more of Hey, people are going to read
Speaker 3: this and they're going to take it seriously, so make
Speaker 3: sure that it's right, make sure that it is is
Speaker 3: not dangerous advice for them. And so I look back
Speaker 3: at some of the things that I wrote early in
Speaker 3: my career and it's not that it was. It was reckless,
Speaker 3: but I would just I would just throw my thoughts
Speaker 3: on the table, regardless of what they were, and throw
Speaker 3: people under the bus, which I tend not to anymore.
Speaker 2: And what is this?
Speaker 1: What is this throwing people under the bus?
Speaker 2: You speak of it.
Speaker 3: You've done it once or twice, and even when they
Speaker 3: deserve it. I think there's a there's a principle. I
Speaker 3: forget who came up with this of like, criticized broadly
Speaker 3: and pre individually. So it's fine to criticize an industry
Speaker 3: and say mortgage bankers in two thousand and five were reckless,
Speaker 3: if not criminal, But once you call them out by name,
Speaker 3: even if they deserve it, that's a tougher thing to do.
Speaker 3: It's usually the case that when you're criticizing somebody, at
Speaker 3: best you have half the story. Sometimes you have five
Speaker 3: percent of the story. But praising in the individual is
Speaker 3: great because you underestimate how much you can change somebody's
Speaker 3: life by praising them when they deserve it.
Speaker 1: Huh, really really insightful thought. So take us along the
Speaker 1: steps and along the aha moments where you realized, oh,
Speaker 1: this is something significant, and I could build a professional
Speaker 1: career doing writing.
Speaker 3: It was interesting for me as a writer. That I
Speaker 3: think might be a little bit unique is day one
Speaker 3: that I was writing for The Mali Fool, the very
Speaker 3: first blog post I ever wrote. I was getting paid
Speaker 3: a full time salary. It was not exhorbingan but I
Speaker 3: was living off of it from day one. And ninety
Speaker 3: percent of bloggers go through years where they're not making
Speaker 3: a single cent and nobody's reading their work. And so
Speaker 3: I had made a profession out of it from day one,
Speaker 3: and there was really no ramp of let's see how
Speaker 3: I can make money from this. As the years went on,
Speaker 3: it could increase, and then I got into speaking in
Speaker 3: books and some other things.
Speaker 1: So what was next? After Motley Fool?
Speaker 3: After a mither Fool, I joined the Collaborative Fund, which
Speaker 3: is a private equity firm, and my entire job now
Speaker 3: been there for ten nine ten years. Yeah, and my
Speaker 3: entire job there is writing. It's a home for my writing.
Speaker 3: And so it's all that I've ever done, but finding
Speaker 3: unique ways to make a living out of doing it.
Speaker 2: There's several different ways you could do it.
Speaker 3: You can be a full time reporter for Reuters or
Speaker 3: for your local news or for the New York Times.
Speaker 3: That's one way to do it. You can do substack,
Speaker 3: you can try ads. There's a million different ways to
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 1: So let's get a little technical. Let's talk about some
Speaker 1: blocking and tackling. What sort of tools did you develop,
Speaker 1: What sort of subroutines did you learn that helped you
Speaker 1: become a better writer.
Speaker 3: Ninety nine percent of being a good writer is being
Speaker 3: a good reader, and ninety percent of your time as
Speaker 3: a writer is reading. And so the huge majority of
Speaker 3: my day, and it's been like this for almost twenty years,
Speaker 3: is very casually sitting around in my sweatpants reading reading books,
Speaker 3: reading blogs, reading reports, listening to podcasts. And it doesn't
Speaker 3: look like work, but that's the work of a writer
Speaker 3: because you do that and you start putting the pieces
Speaker 3: together of Oh, I read this chapter in this book
Speaker 3: and it reminded me of something I listened to in
Speaker 3: this podcast, which reminded me of the study that I
Speaker 3: read recently. I can tie all those together and come
Speaker 3: up with a really unique story myself that I can
Speaker 3: write about. And so that's that is what writing is
Speaker 3: is reading, and what writing is not is forcing yourself
Speaker 3: at the keyboard, forcing the sentences out. That's when you
Speaker 3: get the worst writing. You should spend all of your
Speaker 3: time reading and thinking and maybe ten percent of your
Speaker 3: time actually writing.
Speaker 1: I love that. That's really really insightful. Psychology Money came out?
Speaker 1: Was that twenty twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: One September twenty twenty, all.
Speaker 1: Right, so twenty twenty, So that's a you know, a
Speaker 1: dozen years after you begin at the Motley Fool. What
Speaker 1: was a transition like writing a book from writing a
Speaker 1: bunch of really short blog posts?
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: It was interesting because when I started writing Psychology and Money,
Speaker 3: I was like, hey, this is a book, this is
Speaker 3: not a blog. I need to have five thousand word
Speaker 3: chapters and they all need to be cohesive and tell
Speaker 3: a singular narrative. And that's what I set out to write.
Speaker 3: And I've told the story before. But after about three months,
Speaker 3: maybe six months, I had three really bad chapters, none
Speaker 3: of which made it in the book, because I was
Speaker 3: trying to do something that I had no experience doing.
Speaker 2: And I had to look.
Speaker 3: Back and say, look, for the previous twelve years, I
Speaker 3: have a skill and a muscle of writing one thousand
Speaker 3: word blog posts. I don't have a skill of writing
Speaker 3: five thousand word chapters. It's just not something that I do.
Speaker 3: And so I just kind of I threw everything out
Speaker 3: and I said, look, I need to leverage whatever little
Speaker 3: strength that I have and say I'm good at writing
Speaker 3: short form blogs that can kind of live on their own.
Speaker 3: They're not going to tie tie into the next chapter.
Speaker 3: They're all going to be kind of like standalone, live
Speaker 3: on their own. The publisher hated that, said it's not
Speaker 3: going to work. People want a cohesive book, and I said, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, but this is all that I can do,
Speaker 3: like to deal with it. And I think it actually
Speaker 3: worked out well because it's easy to underestimate how much
Speaker 3: people's attention spans have declined in the last fifteen years,
Speaker 3: and so the attention to read a three hundred page
Speaker 3: nonfiction book that is a cohesive narrative from page one
Speaker 3: to page three hundred is very difficult.
Speaker 2: It's a big ass these days.
Speaker 3: But can you ask people to flip through short chapters
Speaker 3: that live on their own. If you don't like this chapter,
Speaker 3: just flip to the next. You can start there. That
Speaker 3: is a better ask. And everybody knows the nonfiction business
Speaker 3: book that could have been a blog post. It could
Speaker 3: have been a magazine article, but they stretched it into
Speaker 3: three hundred pages. I think the only way that you
Speaker 3: could avoid that was by writing short, standalone chapters that
Speaker 3: live on their own.
Speaker 2: Here's my point.
Speaker 3: Let me tell an interesting story, and then I'm going
Speaker 3: to move on to the next one and not waste
Speaker 3: your time.
Speaker 1: So I find it hilarious. We share the same publisher
Speaker 1: for How Not To Invest, that you wrote the forward to,
Speaker 1: and your book The Psychology of Money. This is the
Speaker 1: first time I'm hearing that they weren't enthralled with your
Speaker 1: original concept the have we crossed eight million copies yet
Speaker 1: you're like seven million on the way to eight million.
Speaker 1: I have a whole section in my book about none
Speaker 1: of the professionals know what's gonna sell. Nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: do Star Wars. They all passed on Raiders. This et
Speaker 1: movie is dumb. We have another Spaceman movie like on
Speaker 1: and on it goes John Wick, Squid Games. All the
Speaker 1: reviews of the Beatles, initially on ed Sullivan were horrible.
Speaker 1: It's I'm shocked to hear that the experts were like, eh,
Speaker 1: we're not really impressed with this concept.
Speaker 3: There's a Daniel Common quote where he said the more
Speaker 3: outlier of the successes, the more an element of luck
Speaker 3: played a role, not that it all luck, but he
Speaker 3: phrased it as like there's no exception to that rule.
Speaker 3: The more standard deviations it is as an outlier, the
Speaker 3: more luck there was period end of story. And I
Speaker 3: think that's true for books as well. It's true for
Speaker 3: every startup. Jeff Bezos tells a story about how much
Speaker 3: he struggled to raise one million dollars to sell one
Speaker 3: third of it. I think it was of Amazon in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety four. Could he had to take one hundred
Speaker 3: calls to get to raise one hundred to raise one
Speaker 3: million dollars for Amazon? So it's it always makes sense
Speaker 3: in hindsight, it never makes sense with foresight.
Speaker 2: I think that's true.
Speaker 3: And I think books are very much like a seed
Speaker 3: stage startup where even if you do everything right, it's
Speaker 3: probably not going to work. So don't look I don't
Speaker 3: look poorly at all or criticize the publishers who passed
Speaker 3: on a book.
Speaker 1: Huh. And our final question, what's your big takeaway about
Speaker 1: someone thinking about either exploring a career that wasn't their
Speaker 1: original intention or making a career shift towards something that
Speaker 1: they have a natural aspleude towards.
Speaker 3: One thing about careers is that so many of us,
Speaker 3: the careers that we have in our thirties, forties and fifties,
Speaker 3: are tied to our college major that we chose when
Speaker 3: we were seventeen or eighteen. And when you frame how
Speaker 3: absolutely absurd that is that you made a decision when
Speaker 3: you are seventeen years old that is now tying you
Speaker 3: into a career when you're forty five, it's completely insane.
Speaker 3: And so the idea that if you're truly unhappy doing it,
Speaker 3: that you should you should move on to something else.
Speaker 3: There's a great quote from Tilt where he says, if
Speaker 3: you're going to panic, panic early. And I think you
Speaker 3: can tie that to careers as well. If you really
Speaker 3: realize that this is not for you and you're unhappy,
Speaker 3: panic early, quit, move on, cut your losses, move on
Speaker 3: to something else, rather than tying it out for the
Speaker 3: next forty years of your career.
Speaker 1: So, to wrap up, if you're thinking about a career change,
Speaker 1: if you have an aptitude towards a particular skill, if
Speaker 1: you want to just try something different, find a way
Speaker 1: to do that. See what you're capable of, see if
Speaker 1: you can make a go of it. But be aware
Speaker 1: merely pursuing your bliss isn't going to get you anywhere.
Speaker 1: You have to develop some tools, some skills, and some
Speaker 1: abilities in order to earn a living in your new career.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Ridolts. You're listening to Bloomberg's At the Money